Music

Your Favorite Music Fan Will Treasure This Twistable Wireless Speaker

Mashable's Gift of the Day series highlights cool, interesting and fun products for that special someone on your holiday list.

Give the gift of noise this holiday season. HiddenRadio is a uniquely designed, portable wireless speaker that you can "unwrap" each time you use it.

Rather than traditional button volume adjustment, twist HiddenRadio's outer shell to increase or decrease volume. As you would expect, the volume increase as more of the speaker becomes exposed.

In a promo video, co-creator John Van Den Nieuwenhuizen call's HiddenRadio "the world's simplest and most intuitive Bluetooth and radio speaker, ever." The device itself looks like a futuristic canister. It comes in three colors — pure white, graphite black or metallic silver, which matches Mac laptops.

HiddenRadio is Bluetooth-enabled. It searches for matching devices when you first unscrew the speaker, and connecting is as easy as finding the Bluetooth menu on your device. There's also a discreetly placed 3.5mm mini-jack connector on the bottom of HiddenRadio, if you're old school and want to connect your Walkman.

Above all, your friends and family will love HiddenRadio because it looks awesome. But aside from top-notch design, they'll adore its portability and lack of wires.

For all its compactness, however, the device takes a hit in sound quality. And while the device is capable of producing a loud volume, it is not going to replicate the audio of a full-sized speaker. For those who prefer watch movies and TV shows on a laptop, however, HiddenRadio is a perfect solution to the volume troubles you're likely to experience with built-in laptop speakers.

HiddenRadio Wireless Speaker: Brilliant Design, Mediocre Sound

HiddenRadio Bluetooth Speaker

Originally a Kickstarter project, the HiddenRadio ($190) is a Bluetooth speaker an ingenious and attractive design. However, it doesn't sound as good as other wireless speakers available for about the same price.

Cylindrical Design

You twist the cylindrical "lid" of the speaker to turn it on. It also acts as a volume control.

Speaker

The more you twist, the more of the speaker that's revealed, and the louder it gets.

Bottom

The few controls (a switch and tuning buttons) are on the bottom, which also has a semi-adhesive texture to ensure it stays put.

Compared With Jambox

In our listening test, we compared how the HiddenRadio played music with the Jawbone Jambox. The Jambox sounded better, and played louder, but it's rated at 10 hours of battery life to the HiddenRadio's 15.

"Hidden" Design

The HiddenRadio is designed for easy placement.

Colors

The HiddenRadio comes in black, silver and white.

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